For the uninitiated, the NatPlus Contest sounds like just another high school competition: a multidisciplinary exam promising scholarships, prestige, and a line on a college resume. But ask anyone who has made it to the National Finals, and they will tell you a different story. They will tell you about the maze. They will tell you about the "Dark Packet." They will tell you about the year the answer key was a lie.
"Standardized exams are rearview mirrors," Voss famously said in her manifesto, The Plus Condition . "They tell you where a student has been. NatPlus is a headlight. It shows you where they could go."
Defenders counter that NatPlus is honest about the world. "Real research doesn't come with a study guide," says two-time champion Leo Zhang (now a PhD candidate in theoretical physics). "You get incomplete data, contradictory instructions, and a ticking clock. NatPlus isn't cruel. It's real." natplus contest
In 2015, a printing error occurred. The Day Two booklets for Section B (seats 112–145) contained a completely different set of problems—problems that, by all accounts, were impossible. One question allegedly asked: "Prove or disprove the existence of a finite number that is its own successor, using only the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and a haiku about entropy."
Critics call NatPlus "academic hazing." Dr. Marcus Thorne, an education professor at Stanford, argues: "The 'Plus' is just trauma with a fancy name. We are teaching kids that self-destruction is a virtue. No problem set is worth a panic attack." For the uninitiated, the NatPlus Contest sounds like
A four-hour, 100-question multiple-choice exam. Sounds easy? The twist: each question has between 3 and 10 correct answers. Partial credit is a myth. You either circle the exact combination of letters—A, C, E, G—or you get zero. One former finalist, Priya Chandrasekhar (2022), describes it as "taking a Scantron test while someone randomly changes the locks on the answer key."
By J. S. Moreau
This is the "Plus." Only the top 10% from Day Two advance. They enter a sealed room. No phones. No watches. Each student is given a single problem, but it is incomplete. Halfway through the three-hour session, a proctor reads aloud a "Variable Update"—new data that fundamentally changes the problem. In 2019, the Variable was: "Ignore the first two pages. Assume pi = 3.2." In 2021, it was a live video feed of a stock market ticker that students had to incorporate into a calculus proof.